Nord Stream gas pipelines should be dismantled to prevent Europe from being "tempted" – Duda

President of Poland Andrzej Duda said that gas flows from Russia to Western Europe should never be restored, even if Russia and Ukraine reach a peace agreement.

Duda said in an interview with BBC that the Nord Stream gas pipelines, which have not been in use since 2022, "should be dismantled".

He said this would mean that countries such as Germany "would not be tempted" to resume Russian supplies to support their struggling economies.

"I can only hope that European leaders will learn lessons from Russia's aggression against Ukraine and that they will push through a decision to never restore the pumping of gas through this pipeline," Duda stated.

Gas prices in Europe have risen sharply since the closure, and in recent months politicians from the far-right German AfD party have proposed reopening the Nord Stream pipeline.

This is why Duda believes that the Nord Stream pipeline "should be dismantled".

"This pipeline causes a very big threat to Ukraine, to Poland, to Slovakia but also to other Central European countries.

It is a threat from the point of view of energy, from the point of view of the military but also it is a huge economic threat because it means a domination of Russia over Europe in the economic sense," he added.

The Russian gas pipeline Nord Stream 2, in which Russia has invested billions of euros, has not been put into operation since its completion – first because of legal problems, and then because of the outbreak of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine.

In September 2022, one of the branches of NS2 and both branches of Nord Stream 1 were damaged by explosions, and the investigation is still ongoing.

In 2024, Nord Stream 2 AG lost a lawsuit in the EU Court of Justice over a directive that extends the rules of the internal natural gas market to gas pipelines from third countries.